CHAPTER XIII.

PRUDENCE _V._ PASSION

Bayre stared at Monsieur Blaise as he stood shivering and wiping his face with a trembling hand under the bare trees of the avenue. That he was suffering from severe excitement was evident. All the pink colour had left his face; his eyes looked dull and glassy. If he had seen a ghost, or if he had been witness of some frightful crime, he could not have looked less like the comfortable, placid Monsieur Blaise of every day.

“Surely,” said the younger man, persuasively, “you can have no scruples about confiding your discovery to me. Remember I am a member of his family; I am his nephew. I am therefore the last person who could or would help to bring disgrace upon the house.”

But Monsieur Blaise shook his head with decision.

“You say you are his nephew? Well, I don’t doubt it, I never have doubted it since you told me so, but Monsieur Bayre did not receive you as a relation; he did not even speak to you. _Hein!_”

This was undeniable. Bayre was silent.

“If you belong to his family,” went on Monsieur Blaise, after a short pause, during which he had put on his hat and resumed his walk down the avenue, “it is for you to make inquiries, to consult your lawyers, if you choose. But it is not for me to interfere in the matter, neither is it for me to discuss it. We will, if you please, converse upon some other topic.”

But Bayre was not to be put off like this.

“Surely,” he said, “you have told me too much, or not enough. You have confessed that you received a great shock while sitting with me in my uncle’s presence; how can it, then, be indiscreet to admit what discovery it was that affected you so much?”

“I may have been mistaken,” said Monsieur Blaise, beginning to recover his normal colour, and turning his small eyes cunningly towards his companion, as if to find out how much he had betrayed. “I was excited, nervous. We had talked ourselves, you and I, into a sort of feverish, suspicious state, in which trifles seemed to become mountains. What I saw was nothing; well, what I fancied may have been nothing too.”

Bayre tried to recall every smallest fact connected with their short visit. His uncle had sat between the fireplace and a high window; behind him and his table Bayre remembered that there had hung a curtain, or piece of tapestry, which fell in deep folds. The corner was a dark one; his own attention had been riveted upon his uncle and Monsieur Blaise. It was quite possible that some person might have peeped out from behind the hangings during that short interview, and that Monsieur Blaise might have seen and recognised the face of the intruder.

“Did you see, or fancy you saw, anyone in the room besides our three selves?” he asked abruptly.

By the sudden access of agitation in his companion Bayre saw that his guess was a good one.

“What do you mean? I saw nothing, nobody, no, of course not,” he stammered out incoherently. “It is like that, monsieur, I do not see nothing nor nobody. And I will not be interrogated as if by a judge of instruction. If you have the desire of making inquiries you will do so without my assistance. I have seen nothing and I will say nothing.”

And he made as if to button up his own mouth by pressing the large, loose lips together until they looked like a long white seam.

They had reached the open road, and were about to turn to the right, in the direction of the landing-place, when they heard certain sounds behind them which made them look guiltily, anxiously, at each other.

A girl’s voice that spoke in a sort of sigh, a girl’s light footsteps on the hard road. That was all. It was with a guilty look that they met Miss Eden when she called to them to stop. She had followed them from the _château_, her hat held on with one hand and no sort of wrap round her shoulders. She was out of breath, and her eyes were full of distress and anxiety.

Monsieur Blaise raised his hat in silence and would have pushed on without further greeting. But she stood in front of them, with determination in her set face.

“Monsieur Blaise, Mr Bayre!” cried she, passionately, “you shall not pass me without speaking. I demand to know why you came and why you went away so quickly. What have you learnt? What have you found out?”

It maddened Bayre to hear the cold and cutting tone in which his companion replied to the unhappy girl.

“Found out, mademoiselle! Found out! I do not understand. We have found nothing out. Is there anything to find?”

She brushed aside these incoherent evasions with an impatient gesture.

“What nonsense!” she cried passionately. “Do you forget that you discussed my guardian’s eccentricity this very morning, and in my presence?”

Monsieur Blaise looked uncomfortable.

“We may have done,” he said vaguely. “I do not remember. We are all eccentric more or less.”

“Why did you come to see him?”

“Why? Why? I--I--we go to see him, to--to--_ma foi_, mademoiselle, since you have developed eccentricities yourself, since you have the habit of to disappear from your guardian’s house without to inform your friends, I go to your guardian for to formally renounce my pretensions to your hand.”

Bayre was furious at the coolly insolent manner in which Monsieur Blaise made this false statement. But Miss Eden, without allowing him to interfere, went on quietly, her temper quite unruffled,--

“Indeed? You might have withdrawn them this morning when you met me. But then you were not in that mind.”

“Mademoiselle! You accuse me of--”

“Oh, no, no, I accuse you of nothing. But I appeal to you to tell me why you left the house so quickly. I know from Marie Vazon--”

“Ah! What?”

Both Monsieur Blaise and Bayre awaited her answer eagerly.

“Only this, that your abrupt departure has thrown her into a state of the greatest alarm. I found her in the hall, sobbing and screaming, and rocking herself to and fro. Of course she wouldn’t tell me anything, so I’ve come after you to beg you to relieve my anxiety. Mr Bayre, surely _you_ will speak out!”

“Do you think I wouldn’t if I could?” said Bayre, speaking with as much passion as she had shown herself. “I’ve come away because Monsieur Blaise came away. I know nothing. I’m just as much in the dark as yourself.”

She looked incredulously up into his face.

“I shouldn’t have thought you capable of deceiving me, certainly,” said she, “in a matter so important to me. If my guardian were mad, as you seemed to think, you couldn’t, in mercy, keep such a terrible secret to yourself, for my sake. And if--if it were anything else, why, surely you would give me some idea of what was hanging over us, wouldn’t you? If you knew the frightful state of anxiety in which I’m living!”

And her voice suddenly broke and she burst into tears.

Bayre lost his head.

“My darling, my darling, don’t! If you knew what I feel for you, you’d never believe I could deceive you,” cried he, only conscious of her, and not even aware of the fact that poor Monsieur Blaise, brought thus inopportunely face to face with the girl he wished to jilt, had slipped away and was puffing and panting along towards the shore where the boat was waiting.

Miss Eden sobbed on.

“Don’t, don’t,” whispered Bayre, putting his hand upon the girl’s shoulder with diffident tenderness. “Listen. I don’t know anything; _you_ know more than I do. I can only guess what it was that that miserable old panting rhinoceros”--he had by this time discovered the escape of his ponderous companion--“saw in your guardian’s room.”

And he related the events of their short visit, and told how obstinately Monsieur Blaise had refused to confess what it was that frightened him.

Miss Eden did not look up, but she presently spoke from under the handkerchief which she was pressing to her eyes. Bayre’s hand was still hovering near her shoulder; he was still bending over her in a coaxing attitude.

“Do you think he’s mad?” she asked.

“He gave no sign of insanity just now. It was old Blaise and I who behaved like lunatics, running away within a few seconds of being introduced into the room, and flying from the house as if we’d been thieves with the police at our heels!”

Miss Eden dried her eyes and looked up.

“Yes,” said she. “And I behaved more like a lunatic than he, too. For when I came back here two hours ago I went into the _salle à manger_ and found him there, and it was _I_ who stammered and spoke brokenly and in confusion. He watched me quietly, and asked me where I had learnt such erratic habits, and whether I expected a husband to put up with them when I married.”

“Did he say that?”

“Yes, quite quietly, and not as if he cared much whether I went away or not. He asked me where I’d been, and I told him. But he didn’t ask me why I went away, or why I came back again. He didn’t seem to care.”

“Did he say anything about me?”

“Ye-es.”

And then she hesitated.

“Something not very complimentary?”

“He said that his young fool of a nephew had been ‘sniffing about’ the _château_, and, and--”

“Well?”

“He said after all you ought to be welcome to look at the outside of his house as you’d never be a penny the better for what was inside.”

“Well, I’ve never expected to be,” retorted Bayre. “I suppose he’ll find out that I’ve been talking to you, and he’ll be angry with you for that.”

“I don’t care.”

“But I do. Look here. Let me go to him boldly and tell him I want to take you away.”

“Oh, no!”

She tried to run away from him. But Bayre caught her by the wrist and held her, and finding that she was shivering, took off his own overcoat, and insisted, although she struggled and protested, on wrapping her in it.

“Now,” said he, coolly, though the coolness did not extend to his eyes, “you can’t run away without robbing me of my property. I’ll let you go in five minutes, but you must be good and listen to me first. You say you are miserable here--”

“Only lately. It’s all changed suddenly,” said she in a piteous tone.

“Well, you _are_ miserable, and now that you know there’s something wrong, and that you’ve thrown over old Blaise--”

“I didn’t. He’s thrown me over!”

“Well, well, you may congratulate yourself anyhow, I think. For though I may not be a great match, I’m a little more presentable than he is.”

“What you are has nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, but it has, though. Look here, Miss Eden. By-the-bye, haven’t you got a Christian name?”

She hesitated again for a moment, and then said, in a low voice,--

“Olwen.”

Perhaps it was the fact that she was wearing his overcoat which gave him a sort of proprietary feeling. At any rate it was with the simplest straightforwardness that he proceeded, having learnt her Christian name, to call her by it.

“Look here, Olwen, I’m not a rich man; I’ve not even begun to be a successful one. Perhaps I never shall be anything but a struggling man all my life. I tell you so frankly. Perhaps, I say. But I do feel something in me which tells me that if I had the woman I want to struggle for I should be so strong, so dogged, that I should make my way in the long run; I should live for her, I should fight for her, ah! and in the long run I should grow rich for her.”

“I don’t want to be rich,” remarked Miss Eden, plaintively, from under the overcoat.

“Well, then, I could remain poor for her, which would be easier still. Come, come, don’t you think I’d try to make you happy?”

“I--I don’t think my guardian would say so?”

Bayre laughed.

“Would you ask him then?”

“I should have to. You forget, or you don’t understand. Although he hasn’t been very affectionate to me since I’ve been here--since his own troubles, that is to say--Mr Bayre has been a good and kind friend to me ever since my own father’s death. It is he who has paid for my education, too, so that the little my father left should be allowed to accumulate for me. Now you see why I feel an obligation to consult his wishes as far as possible, and why I feel that I did wrong in running away as I did.”

“Well, you had reason to be alarmed. You have reason still. It’s not safe for you to be in the same house with a madman.”

“You don’t know that he’s mad! I don’t know it!”

“Well, there’s something wrong about him, something that makes me very unwilling to leave you under the same roof with him. Yet it’s a delicate business too. For, after all, he’s my own relation; and even old Blaise felt a reluctance about speaking out in the case of a neighbour and friend.”

The two looked gravely into each other’s face.

“It’s full of difficulties,” she said with a sigh. “I feel that I’m pulled first in one direction and then in the other. Though I’ve never been able to be fond of my guardian, I feel I owe a duty to him. And believe me, I should never have run away, as you call it, if I hadn’t been seized with a sort of terror of what was going on, and felt that I must have time to think--to think by myself. And now, what has my thinking brought me to? Nowhere. I’ve had to come back in a sort of disgrace, and I feel that he looks upon me as a traitor.”

Bayre looked uneasy.

“If even one could trust the servants it wouldn’t be so bad,” said he. “But I loathe those Vazons, and the two other women about the place don’t look very intelligent.”

“They’re both in terror of my guardian, and abjectly servile to Marie Vazon,” explained Miss Eden.

“I wonder if they know anything?”

“If they do, they won’t own it. You don’t understand these cunning peasants as well as I do. As long as they get a living here they’ll be content to know nothing, to see nothing, but what they are told to hear and to see. Now, let me give you back your coat. I’m going back to the _château_.”

She had assumed a very precise, matter-of-fact manner, which Bayre had to accept as a sign that all sentimental subjects were to be shelved for the present. He submitted in silence to take his coat. Then she held out her hand.

“When are you going back?”

“I don’t know yet. In the meantime, I’m staying at the house by the landing-place.”

The look of joy that flashed over her face showed him how much relieved she was to find that a friend upon whom she could rely was to be so near.

But she would not give him time to profit by this discovery. With one quick, shy, blushing glance at him she fled away in the direction of the _château_, leaving him strangely excited, and yet comforted, too.